Chrono Cross: Through Heaven and Hell
by Demon-Fighter Ash
Summary: CHAPTER 2 IS NOW READY! This is a story I've been working on for a long while, detailing the origins of the El Nido archipelago and the events that led to CC's shattered history...
1. Author's Notes

Author's Notes  
  
This is a new story I've been working on for awhile, and it's a work-in-progress, with new chapters being written as we speak, and old chapters constantly being proofread and revised. It deals with one of the most mysterious elements of Chrono Cross: the Chronopolis Project, Belthasar's role in the project and his true motives, the events that led to the time-crash, and the prehistoric war fought between FATE and the Dragon.  
  
Anyway, I don't want to give away too much, so here we go...thanks to everyone for reading! =) 


	2. Prologue: Beyond the Darkness of Time

Chrono Cross: Through Heaven and Hell  
An original fanfiction by Demon-Fighter Ash  
based on the Squaresoft game Chrono Cross  
  
Prologue: Beyond the Darkness of Time  
  
Belthasar tumbled endlessly through a twisting abyss of darkness and howling wind, his screams echoing through the void. He snatched vainly at the empty air for something to grab onto, anything to stop the endless stomach-wrenching plunge. The shrieking wind finally began to subside and, somewhere deep within the flickering shadows, he heard human voices echoing and gurgling, the sounds growing louder as a cold white light exploded around him. The old man closed his eyes tight against the blinding glare and suddenly felt solid ground slamming upward into his knees and elbows, throwing him onto his stomach against cold flat rock.  
  
He opened his eyes and looked at the closely-fitted white marble blocks in front of him, realizing after a few bewildered moments that he was looking down at the floor of some sort of plaza. He lifted his head up from the ground, finding himself still crouched on his palms and knees, and looked silently around at the crowds of brightly-dressed people gathered in a circle and staring down at him. Bright shimmering light hurt his eyes and he shook his head, trying to shove himself back onto his feet. He squinted his dark eyes at the crowd and the gleaming fountains of water reflecting bright afternoon sunlight. He looked up at the sky...and his eyes widened as he stared up at the vast plaza, the crowds of staring people and his own purple robes, all reflected in a vast crystal canopy stretching high above the square.  
  
"Where am I," he gasped, still trying to catch his breath, "what is this place?"  
  
The crowds of people just stared at him, even more shocked by his presence than him, and he shook his head again, trying to make sense of the glass sky and bizarre, colorful close-fitting outfits of the people around him, nothing like the loose robes and gold jewelry of his own kingdom.  
  
"I'm from," he panted, "I'm from the kingdom of Zeal. I need to return to the Ocean Palace."  
  
His heart suddenly leapt into his throat as he remembered Schala, screaming in pain as the dark energy of the Mammon Machine consumed her like a flame, the possessed queen staring down at them from atop the gigantic alien beast that their people had called Lavos, just seconds before the black vortex had opened and ripped him through the windswept darkness that had finally dropped him here.  
  
"Listen to me," he called out, his eyes darting between the wide-eyed people, "you have to tell me where I am, there's no time! Schala's in danger, the queen's gone mad, and I have to go back and stop her before our whole kingdom's destroyed! I have to go back!"  
  
"He's one of them," he heard one young woman mutter to her friends in a low trembling voice, "look at his clothes, he has to be one of them. It's happening all over again..."  
  
A group of men in loose black slacks and thick leather jackets raced silently forward through the vast square, darting between the fountains and scattered crowds of staring people, and all of them quickly surrounded the guru, forming a wide circle around him. Each of them dropped onto knee as they took up their positions, each man gripping a large black metal wand with both hands and aiming the hollow tips at the wizened old man. Belthasar stared around in bemusement, then slowly turned toward their leader, a tall dark-haired man wearing a thick square crystal monocle over his left eye. Belthasar suddenly realized that their wands were some kind of weapons, and confusion flickered through his still-scrambed thoughts as he saw their leader's grim face reflecting the same muted fear as the crowd.  
  
"This is Medina Dome," their leader answered in a slow tense voice, his eyes wide as he stared at Belthasar, "you'll need to come with us right now."  
  
"But there's no time for that," Belthasar cried out in exasperation, turning back and forth to stare at the crowd of people and soldiers, "I have to go back to the Ocean Palace! Schala's linked to the mammon machine and if I don't go back, Lavos will awaken and everyone will die!"  
  
The whole crowd gasped in horror at the sentence and even the black-clothed leader seemed to flinch for a moment before quickly hardening his expression and looking back up at Belthasar.  
  
"Sir," he said, staring intently at the guru, "I'm taking you into custody. Come with us and you won't be harmed...but if you try to resist we'll be forced to open fire."  
  
"I'm sorry," he sighed as he lifted one palm toward the general, closing his dark gleaming eyes as he began to focus his thoughts, "but I just don't have time for this...IGNIUS ATRA!"  
  
A spiralling ribbon of black energy swept outward around the old man's purple robes and an orb of twisting shadows quickly wrapped around the group of soldiers kneeling in front of him, suddenly engulfing them and knocking them to the ground. He quickly spread his palms out to either side and invisible blasts buffeted the rest of the soldiers around him. Their guns clattered against the marble and the men tumbled backward against the sweeping waves of cold dark power radiating from the old man.  
  
Belthasar gave a forlorn glance at the fallen soldiers and looked up at the paved plaza and petrified bystanders, briefly noticing other creatures scattered among the crowd--chimeric, almost-human beings that reminded him, more than anything else, of the nus who lived among the floating islands of Zeal. But he didn't have time to worry about either them or the terrified humans right now: somewhere, on the other side of the vortex, Zeal and all its people were being annihilated by Lavos.  
  
He glanced back up at the dome stretching miles above him, the crystal shell still intact; he must have emerged from some spot between the glass ceiling and marble floor. Belthasar quickly realized that he had to get outside, to see the sky and figure out exactly where the vortex had taken him...and then he suddenly dropped to his knees, his dark eyes wide in surprise and thoughts shattered by a sudden burst of scorching pain sweeping through his limbs. A second orb of golden crackling electricity slammed through the air into his chest and he tumbled to the ground, his thoughts fading to darkness.  
  
"You only stunned him," the raven-haired captain asked the soldier who'd fired both shots as the rest of his men picked themselves up from the ground, "right?"  
  
"Yes sir," the younger soldier answered as he tapped a few buttons on the side of his pulse-rifle, the black metal weapon giving a soft hum as its batteries powered down, "that was just a low-voltage airborne charge. He'll regain consciousness in a few hours."  
  
"Good," the captain nodded, "call an airlift and have him taken to Arris Dome's med-clinic at once. We'll examine him for any complications and question him there."  
  
"Sir," the soldier hesitated before suddenly asking, "he's one of them, isn't he? That blue sphere when he appeared, his powers...and he said something about Lavos..."  
  
"It's been almost three hundred years," the black-suited captain answered stiffly, "until we know the whole story, we can't make assumptions. I've given my orders...so move out already!"  
  
The young soldier nodded and jogged forward to catch up with the group already gathered around the old man, and the captain tapped a small button on the side of his digital monocle. A flat glowing image of a blue computer screen suddenly appeared against the inside of the transparent glass lens, seeming to float against the crowded, bustling background. He spoke in a soft whisper, the hidden microphone and voice-recognition devices embedded within the golden frame of the eyepiece picking up his voice.  
  
"Mother Brain," he said quietly as he looked around at the frightened civilians and the soldiers hoisting thier arms beneath the old man's shoulders and carrying him toward the main entrance, "establish a secure uplink to the prime minister, authorization code alpha-317B."  
  
"Captain Tyrel," the pleasant female voice of Mother Brain's artificial-intelligence program answered through the earpiece, "the prime minister is in a priority-three meeting. A clearance level of five or greater is required to override the communication lockout."  
  
"Then override the lockout," he answered the computer, glancing around at the civilians to make sure nobody could hear him before continuing, "level five clearance confirmation 25C-467, and inform the prime minister that," he paused, "inform him that another gate-traveller has arrived." 


	3. Part 1: Future's End, Chapter 1: The Sec...

Chrono Cross: Through Heaven and Hell  
An original fan-fiction by Demon-Fighter Ash  
based on the Square game "Chrono Cross"  
  
  
Part 1: Future's End  
  
  
Chapter 1: The Secret Sea  
March, 2398 AD  
  
Kalim peered out the wide crystal window filling the southern wall of the marble office, squinting in the bright flickering sunlight as he watched silver streams of glittering hover-cars sweeping between the prismatic denadorite-coated skyscrapers. Vast flocks of distant hover-cars parted into winding ribbons and merged back into single lines like starlings far beneath the sheer obsidian walls of the military center, and he strained his eyes to make out the pedestrian walkways beneath the wispy clouds.  
  
He caught a glimpse of his own reflection in the glass, his shaggy blue hair hanging loosely around his ears, the edges of his loose black leather jacket and dark slacks almost seeming to blend into his gray shirt in the shimmering crystalline reflection. He stared curiously into his mirror image's sapphire eyes; most of the office buildings, including the universiy where he lived and worked, now used transparent low-level force-fields as windows, and he hadn't seen his own reflection in a glass window since he was a child. He shook his head, wondering how old the stark black tower of the Zenan military command-center actually was, and then whirled back toward the oak-panelled double-doors as sharp clicking footsteps echoed through the outside hallway.  
  
"Kalim Skuld," a deep commanding voice called out as the doors swung open, and a tall powerful man dressed in the black gold-fringed uniform of the Zenan Coalition officers strode into the wide marble chambers, a gray stubble on the older man's square-jawed, and otherwise bald, face. Kalim did a slight double-take, trying to hide his surprise; he'd seen General Sharl giving press conferences on the public holo-images, speaking on behalf of the prime-minister. Kalim had received an electronic notice to report to "office 247" on the top floor of the Monolith, the military command center that rose like a black slab from the middle of the capital city of Trann, but even the office secretary hadn't told him who he was meeting.  
  
"The secretary," Kalim answered nervously, with an apologetic glance at the ivory-white walls of the chamber, obviously Sharl's office, "told me to wait in the office."  
  
"That's right," Sharl nodded and Kalim relaxed slightly at the half-smile crossing the general's stern features, the man's dark eyes focused on him, "it's an honor to meet you, Professor Skuld."  
  
"I," Kalim started to say, then paused, unsure of where to begin: that the general of the whole Coalition army was honored to meet him, of all people, or that Sharl had called him professor, when he was really just a teaching assistant, still a year away from a full doctorate.  
  
"And you," Kalim said blankly after a moment, then added, "how are you today?"  
  
It was a stupid question, but it had crossed his lips before he realized it, the automatic small-talk he used to deal with new people. Fortunately, Sharl either didn't notice how inane it was, or decided to simply treat it as serious and reasonable a question as any other.  
  
"Not well, I'm afraid," he answered seriously, "which is why we've called you here. I understand, Mr. Skuld, that you're one of the most highly-respected physicists at the Ashtear Institute of Technology, the protege of Belthasar himself, back when he was a professor."  
  
"Kalim is fine," the young man said quickly, having never liked his last name. He'd gained a reputation as Belthasar's protege, one he'd never felt he deserved--all he did was have coffee with his old professor and helped him work on some of the more interesting puzzles and theories in quantum-theory and temporal physics; he'd considered Belthasar a friend, and still slightly resented the way people interpreted that friendship as some status symbol or measure of his own talent.  
  
"Right," Sharl nodded, "I've read some of your published papers, Kalim. You've even found ways to improve on Belthasar's theories about time, correcting some of his equations."  
  
"I wouldn't say that," Kalim answered sheepishly, embarrassed by the suggesting that he could ever improve on his mentor's wisdom, "I just speculated that under some conditions, a non-causal influence on the past might not actually change history, but instead divide the original timeline along the probability axis, creating two or more parallel timelines that...  
  
"But," Kalim finished with a tight awkward smile, realizing how close he'd come to going into one of his college lectures, "you said you've read them, so you know that already."  
  
"I have," General Sharl nodded, and he gestured toward a small pale cushioned seat in front of the desk as he stepped behind the wide glass-covered stone desk and sat down, and Kalim quickly took the seat before the desk, "most of the council thinks you could be the second-best mind on the planet."  
  
"Oh," Kalim said, and thought silently to himself, trying to figure out what to say, then simply shrugged, "even if that's true, that's still a huge gap. I'm nowhere close to Belthasar."  
  
"Who is," Sharl replied, and settled into his own cushioned leather chair, swinging it around to face the young scientist, "how much do you know about Belthasar's latest assignment?"  
  
"Nothing," Kalim answered, suddenly beginning to suspect why he might have been called to the Monolith, "Belthasar never told me why he had to leave the institute, he just said it was more important than I could imagine. I haven't heard from him in almost four years."  
  
"I see," the general nodded sternly, hands clasped before his face as he grew more serious, "then it seems we have the same problem. Belthasar has disappeared."  
  
"Wha," Kalim jolted upright in surprise, "how? He was working for the military, wasn't he?"  
  
"He was," Sharl nodded, "but three weeks ago he failed to report for his shift. A search of the facilities found no trace of him, and he's been gone ever since then."  
  
"It's a military facility, isn't it," Kalim suddenly said, his normally mild temper rising at the thought of his old friend and mentor vanishing in the middle of an entire army, "how could you have lost him, don't you have video-cameras and soldiers for this kind of thing?"  
  
"We do," the general replied, "and they didn't see a thing. We've torn through the whole complex trying to find him, and so far we've found nothing. The only thing our forensic reports can conclude is that Belthasar must have left the project and covered his trail, or someone else with just as much knowledge about the project covered up his departure. We still don't know how that could happen."  
  
"What does that mean," Kalim sighed.  
  
"A lot of the council members," Sharl answered slowly, "think it means that he defected."  
  
"That's impossible," Kalim quickly shot back, tensed within his seat, "Belthasar didn't give a damn about the cold war or the Choras Alliance, all he cared about was science, helping mankind..."  
  
"It's one theory," Sharl interrupted, "and we don't have enough information yet to come up with anything else. We contacted you because you might be able to help us find out what happened to him, and to continue his work. I need to know if you'll accept the position."  
  
Position, Kalim asked himself, who had said anything about a position? He didn't know what Belthasar had been doing for the past four years, and Sharl hadn't offered any clues. He wondered for a moment if he'd missed part of the conversation, then decided to simply ask.  
  
"What position?"  
  
"That's classified," Sharl answered quickly.  
  
"You," Kalim said slowly, scratching the back of his head and leaning forward in his seat as he tried to make sense out of the offer, "you...want to know whether I'll accept a job...but you can't even tell me what I'm being offered?"  
  
"This is the same offer we made to all the scientists involved in this project," Sharl answered, "and it's the offer we made to Belthasar himself. Nobody's regretted the choice."  
  
"Except for Belthasar," Kalim muttered to himself, then spoke up, "what is this project?"  
  
"What do you know," the general asked as he suddenly stood up from his desk, "about the El Nido Sea?"  
  
"I know," Kalim repeated Sharl's question softly, having to think back to the stories he read in elementary school, "that it's a barren patch of ocean several hundred miles west of the Zenan continent. There have been stories about ships and aircraft vanishing there, dating more than a thousand years, but scientists think it's just a folktale, like the Heckran of Mystic Mountain."  
  
"I can't tell you anymore than that," General Sharl said as he paced around the desk to stand before the chair, "all I can tell you is one of the responsibilities of your position will be to use its resources to find out what's happened to Belthasar and why he disappeared. Do you accept it?"  
  
Kalim shook his head slowly as he tried to process everything that he'd just heard. Belthasar had worked on a military project so secret that, even now, General Sharl refused to say anything about it, and he had vanished three weeks ago--his heart sank at the thought of how long that was, at all the things that could've happened in those weeks. Sharl, and probably the whole security council, wanted him to take some assignment that they wouldn't explain, one that had something to do with El Nido...  
  
But Sharl also said that he would have a chance to find Belthasar, maybe help him.  
  
"Alright," Kalim said quickly as he stood up, briefly wondering if he was making a horrible mistake and swallowing the sudden burst of self-doubt and dread, "I'll accept it. I'll have to take a leave of absence from the Ashtear Institute, but I should be ready to leave, for wherever I have to go, by tomorrow..."  
  
"That won't be necessary," the general replied quickly with a single shake of his head, his black gleaming eyes narrowing in approval at Kalim's answer, "we've already arranged your immediate transfer from the Ashtear Institute. The paperwork's been handled."  
  
"You arranged my immediate transfer," Kalim slowly repeated in wide-eyed shock, "what were you going to do if I hadn't accepted the job?"  
  
"I would have placed you in protective military custody," Sharl answered matter-of-factly, without even an instant's hesitation, "until the situation had been resolved. We couldn't risk any security breach by allowing you to remain a civilian, with your knowledge of the project."  
  
"But I don't KNOW anything," Kalim muttered in disbelief, bewildered by how paranoid Sharl had suddenly become. All he could glean from their mystifying conversation was that Belthasar was part of a project in the El Nido Sea, and that he'd disappeared--and yet Sharl acted as though he had given Kalim the authorization codes and security clearance to command the whole Zenan fleet.  
  
"We have a shuttle ready to leave for El Nido in fifteen minutes," the general continued as he turned toward the hallway, "the launch platform is on the first floor, through the back of the main offices. My secretary will lead you there. Your shuttle-flight is the Syrinx, registry XR-318."  
  
"I don't suppose," Kalim sighed with resignation, "I can go back to my apartment and pack?"  
  
"Give us a list of clothes and personal items," Sharl said with a quick shake of his head as he opened the polished wooden doors and turned to lead Kalim back out into the silent hallway, "and we'll have them shipped to your new location by tomorrow. We can't risk a security breach of this magnitude, even if it's just for a few minutes," then, unexpectedly, the bald-haired man smiled slightly through his silver stubble, "it may sound extreme, but trust me...you'll understand once you've arrived."  
  
* * *  
  
Kalim sat alone in the back of the shuttle, a small tan-colored compartment with two sets of white polyester-cushioned seats facing each other; he sat by the long curved window that wrapped across the whole front half of the aircraft, on the left seat, facing toward the open cockpit perched above the back of the rear-facing seats. The ship itself was remarkably small, the whole thing little bigger than his bedroom: a white round tear-shaped vessel with two sleek and rounded, yet also small and stubby, wings protruding beneath the crescent-shaped window that stretched around the port side of the vessel, over the front of the ship, and then back around to the starboard side. The interior was Spartan in design; a sunken square cabin with four seats for passengers, the rear-facing seats divided by three steps leading up into the open cockpit, with only the back of the front seats separating him from the pilot.  
  
He swept his straight blue hair back through his fingers and glanced out the window, looking down at the blur of blue and white streaks beneath him as the shuttle raced forward within a stream of invisible magnetic force. The craft was far too fat, and its wings too small, to possibly support it with conventional propulsion, and the stubby wings instead simply kept it balanced while the dual magnetic projectors in the cone created a powerful magnetic tunnel around the craft. The projected field magnetically dragged the ship forward through the air like the proverbial carrot hanging in front of the donkey, soundlessly and with no exhaust or fuel.  
  
Kalim pulled out the flat gray notebook-sized digital workpad that Sharl had given him, and pushed a small button on the plastic frame beneath the screen, the black computer screen lighting up with icons. He quickly looked over the menu and puzzled over a plain folder labelled "history of the frozen flame" before finally touching the icon with his forefinger; the screen switched to a white text-screen and he began reading the file...  
  
"February 8th, 2393 AD - An unusual gravitational field was discovered in the barren El Nido Sea during an undersea mining expedition sponsored by the Toma Corporation. The original team, led by Taren Walker, investigated the field and found the frozen flame several feet above the ocean floor, near the western perimeter of the enclosed sea. Their attempts to remove the flame from its original location had catastrophic results, and military scientists from the Zenan Coalition were enlisted to investigate the phenomenon."  
  
Kalim shook his head, trying to figure out what the file could possibly be referring to, then tapped the name "frozen flame," highlighting it and silently running a computer-search on the name. He'd never heard the phrase before in his life, and nothing in the text offered any hint of its meaning.  
  
The workpad suddenly gave a quick series of chirping beeps.  
  
"Access denied," a new window of text suddenly popped onto the screen over the file he'd just been reading, "level 3 security clearance required for information about the frozen flame."  
  
He shook his head with a sigh and opened the machine-language program, directly accessing the network that linked the small portable computer to the processing core of Mother Brain, the planet-wide computer system.  
  
The Mother Brain artificial-intelligence program had run all the production centers and archives of their world for almost four centuries, with the help of constant upgrades and modifications. Even so, the original programming language was fairly simple, and several years ago, on a particularly boring night, he'd entertained himself by figuring out the algorithms it used to determine a user's security clearance. He could trick Mother Brain into giving him virtually any file with just a few lines of code, and only his sense of honesty had kept him from taking advantage of the outdated programs of the Mother Brain system.  
  
Kalim finished typing a whole slew of new security subprograms and algorithms, forcing Mother Brain to open all text files relating to the frozen flame, and he smiled a little with triumph as he pressed the enter key and leaned back in his seat, gripping the flat square disk in one hand as he waited for the file to appear.  
  
The handheld computer gave another string of high-pitched beeps.  
  
"Access denied," another text-box read, "level 3 security clearance will be granted upon your arrival at the facility, Lieutenant Skuld."  
  
Kalim blinked in surprise and slowly dropped the workpad in his lap as he looked back out the window at the blurred seaweed-draped ocean far beneath the gliding shuttle; he knew the programming language perfectly, there was no way Mother Brain could have told the difference between him and any core-maintenance worker or system-operator. And there was definitely no way it should have known him by name...  
  
"Let me guess," the pilot called back into the cabin, "FATE"s giving you a hard time."  
  
"Well," Kalim replied, blinking with confusion, "I wouldn't say it's fate. It's really just this computer..."  
  
The pilot suddenly laughed, his voice rising into a parrot-like cackling caw, and he glanced back at Kalim for a moment, deep blue feathers covering his head, except for a thick yellow beak and beady round black eye, then turned back to the controls as he talked in a shrill clicking voice.  
  
"No, I don't mean it like that," he chuckled, "I mean FATE, it's the name of the computer."  
  
"You mean this isn't linked to Mother Brain?"  
  
"Nope," the bird-like mystic replied, "FATE's based on the original Mother Brain software matrix, but most of her core programming has been rewritten by Belthasar since then. She's the computer that runs the El Nido project's archives and technology.  
  
"He actually programmed a computer," Kalim said softly to himself, whistling in surprise; as brilliant as Belthasar had been at theoretical physics, he had always seemed slightly out of place whenever he dealt with technology. Kalim fondly remembered all the times that he'd had to place the orders at the university's automated food courts while Belthasar silently poured over the old-fashioned paper books that he loved to read, occasional jotting down notes in the margins with the quill pens he'd made himself.  
  
"You knew Belthasar," the pilot asked with a backward glance then, without waiting for an answer, began talking again, "he's a great guy. Most of the physicists just live in their heads, but he liked everybody, he didn't care about rank or how much you knew about science. I probably wouldn't even be here if it weren't for him; let's face it, you don't see many mystics working at the Zenan military bases, but he treated everyone the same."  
  
Kalim smiled a little, almost looking forward to seeing the warm-hearted old professor again, before he suddenly remembered why he was coming to El Nido in the first place. His heart sank and he stared silently through the window, watching a flashing sea of ominous thunderclouds give way to the dark churning ocean once more. After a moment's silence, the bird-like pilot began talking again.  
  
"Sorry if I'm rambling on," he chirped, "but we don't get to meet many new people in El Nido. It's been six months since I've even seen the mainland. It hasn't changed at all, but it's weird seeing all those skyscrapers and hovercars after living in El Nido for so long..."  
  
"You're on the staff," Kalim asked.  
  
"Yeah," the avian pilot cawked, "the whole thing's too top-secret to hire pilots from the outside, so I've got double-duty. Usually I'm on the maintenance crew for FATE's processing centers."  
  
"Why do you call the computer that," Kalim asked, leaning forward on his knees.  
  
"It's an acronym," the pilot replied, and then he paused, filling the shuttle with an awkward silence.  
  
"It's classified," Kalim said with a disappointed sigh, leaning back against his seat once more.  
  
"Yeah," the pilot said, his voice lowered slightly, and then after another pause, he spoke up, his voice quick and cheerful, "but what the heck, I'm sure you'll find out as soon as we get there anyway. The name stands for 'Flame Arbitration and Temporal Engineering' system."  
  
Kalim tried to dissect the phrase. "Flame arbitration" probably referred to the "frozen flame," whatever that meant, but he didn't have a clue what "temporal engineering" meant--except, perhaps, for one meaning that seemed too unimaginable to consider.  
  
A flash of deep metallic green suddenly filled the window and he felt the shuttle rock and tilt left and right as the pilot quickly wrenched the ship back upright. Kalim stared out the window and caught a quick glimpse of a huge emerald serpent undulating up and down through the clouds, supported by six slender fluttering dragonfly-wings, the sunlight reflecting off the iridescent scales and nearly blinding him; each of the thing's wings were bigger than a man, and the segmented beast itself was as large as a whale. The young man stared in shock as it disappeared into a white billowing cloud, then whirled toward the cockpit.  
  
"What," he hissed as he finally managed to breathe, "was THAT?!"  
  
"That," the pilot answered with a sigh, "was a wingapede. This is gonna make things a lot trickier. I'd better radio the center and tell Tessik to bring a security detail to the landing platform. Anyway, we're coming up on the El Nido Sea now. You won't get many chances to see it from up here..."  
  
Kalim turned back to the strip of glass running along the walls of the shuttle and stared out at the vast heaving ocean beneath them, now a bright turquoise-green color. Faint feathery white clouds drifted beneath the shuttle and they suddenly crossed a wide ring of jagged coral and algae-coated islets into a huge open expanse of still blue water. He looked over the empty Sea of El Nido, stretching out from beneath the shuttle to the very rim of the horizon, then blinked in surprise as several islands emerged from the steamy mists of the tropical sea. A small desert island covered with sand lay near the northern rim of the enclosed sea, above a tiny crimson island dominated by a steep jagged volcano.  
  
He slid quickly down the seat to the opposite window and peered out along the southern edge of the sea, to find a third island, no wider than a few miles, but covered with lush green forests and glittering pools of crystal water. He twisted his head to look back past the tail of the shuttle at the western rim of the El Nido Sea to find yet another island, a perfectly round plateau with straight rocky cliffs rising high above the crashing waves, shrouded in a deep silent fog.  
  
The aircraft glided across another, smaller ring of bright lime-green coral, and Kalim shook his head as he stared down at the mind-bending sight within small lagoon beneath them. The ocean itself seemed to rise out of the lagoon into the sky, along three straight walls of water, the phantasmal structure capped by a triangular roof of shimmering seawater.  
  
"What is that," he softly asked as he stared at a ring of bubbles as large as a city, set in the middle of the huge triangular shell of water that they now circled. He noticed that each corner of the shell was marked by a tiny islet, and that the shell itself seemed to glow with a faint turquoise light.  
  
"That's the center's force-field," the pilot replied, "it's not just a physical barrier, it also refracts the optical image of the surrounding ocean around itself. It might look pretty strange up-close, but to satellites and high-altitude aircraft, it's a perfect camouflage. I'm transmitting the security codes now..."  
  
The watery shell seemed to shudder for a moment and it suddenly began to pour away, cascading into countless crashing waterfalls; it had to be an illusion, Kalim reminded himself, since the water itself was just a mirage, but it looked as though all the water was rushing down the walls of the shell in huge thundering torrents, until the barrier had drained completely away. He now saw a single island in the center of the lagoon, nearly covered by a sterling platinum-white city that, on one side, rose into a tapering tower of alternating red and white terraces, the fortress surrounded by a hexagonal ring of roads and covered corridors at half a mile wide.  
  
"I thought," Kalim managed to say as he stared down at the city, "the El Nido Sea was empty."  
  
"It used to be," the pilot replied, and then the shuttle suddenly banked to the left as it twisted back around toward the central island, "brace yourself...we're about to land."  
  
* * *  
  
  
Kalim hopped out of the cramped shuttle to find himself on an empty plain of white concrete, littered with small shuttles much like the Syrinx, the landing strip stretching away into neatly-clipped grassy meadows behind him. The glass walls of the city, reflecting the deep blue sky and drifting clouds, rose up before him along the northern edge of the strip, and the tower that he'd seen from the air loomed behind the smaller glass buildings, overlooking the whole island. He could see now that the tower looked almost mechanical, like a giant fuse, the white sterling metal rings and smoothly-curved walls tapering up from the ruby-hued base toward a single horseshoe-shaped metal ring that surrounded the slender neck of the building, perhaps as a sort of transmitter. The tower expanded back out above the horseshoe into a wide cup surrounded by two rings, and he tried to figure out what purpose such a bizarre design could serve...  
  
Several people walked briskly between the scattered shuttles and he turned his attention toward the small group now approaching him. A young woman with long straight blonde hair tied into a ponytail and a pale, tensed, triangular face seemed to lead the other two figures; her ice-blue eyes seeming to narrow at him and he glanced down at her short-sleeved white cotton shirt and tan-colored slacks.  
  
Kalim twisted his head slightly to study the next figure: the dark-eyed man wore a tall black hat with a gold plate across the front, along with a black gold-fringed trenchcoat, the collar raised around his neck and a purple sash tied around the waist of the trenchcoat, the unmistakable uniform of a high-ranking Zenan military officer.  
  
He glanced behind them to the third person, and then suddenly realized that it wasn't a person at all: a large round RY-series robot kept pace with the other two, his golden body divided into two segments, his chest and waist lined with studded leather flaps, and his head a flat metal saucer with two emerald-green optical sensors.  
  
"So then," the woman called out as the group neared the shuttle, "you're the new project director?"  
  
"The new," Kalim suddenly glanced about, making sure nobody else had stepped out of the shuttle before realizing she meant him, "wait a minute, I'M the new project director?!"  
  
"He wouldn't know," the dark-suited man said to her as the three reached the shuttle, "the briefings only take place upon arrival. All he knows right now is that he accepted a post here."  
  
"Fine," the woman rolled her eyes impatiently, "is your name Kalim Skuld?"  
  
"Yes," Kalim answered quizzically.  
  
"Then you're the new project director," she nodded decisively, "my name's Alissa, I've been the acting director since Belthasar's disappearance. This is," she gestured to the tall expressionless man in the dark trenchcoat, "Tessik, our security director and the current biological interface of the FATE system. You do know," she asked slowly, "what the FATE system is, right?"  
  
"Of course," he answered defensively, with a quick grateful glance to the shuttle-pilot, the birdlike mystic with thick blue feathers and a parrot-like head that swivelled nervously about as he watched the sky; if it hadn't been for their conversation during the flight, Kalim wouldn't have even known that much, although the term "biological interface" still didn't really make sense to him.  
  
"I called for a security team," the pilot suddenly chirped, "we attracted a wingapede on the way here."  
  
"Oh great," Alissa sighed with exasperation, and she whirled around to address the security officer, "this is exactly why I wanted him brought here by boat instead of a shuttle! Every time we use an aircraft within sight of their island they mistake it for another wingapede and their territorial instincts take over."  
  
"We won't need to waste a security team on this situation," the dark-cloaked man named Tessik answered the pilot, "I can handle a wingapede on my own."  
  
"Yeah, we know how YOU handle them," Alissa answered, her hands on her hips as she turned back toward Tessik, "if people would just stop flying their shuttles around that island, we wouldn't have this problem..."  
  
The golden robot quietly stepped around them as they began to argue, and he bowed slightly to Kalim before introducing himself to the puzzled young scientist in a series of high-pitched digital chirps.  
  
"Greetings," he said cheerfully, "I am Robo, model number R-66Y. Belthasar has said much about you, Kalim. Please forgive the ill manners of my colleagues. The situation has been very tense since the disappearance of our former project director."  
  
"So Belthasar was the director," Kalim said to himself, and it suddenly made sense. Who better for the military, he thought, to send as a replacement for Belthasar than Belthasar's protege?  
  
"Yes," the robot answered, "he actually founded the project. What you see here represents the culmination of his life's work."  
  
"Everybody down," Tessik's deep voice quickly shouted, and Kalim felt the bulky metal joints beneath Robo's rubber-covered hand grabbing his shoulder and shoving him face-first onto the ground. He twisted his head up from the concrete to see a deep black shadow fall over the landing strip--and then the same green scales he'd seen from the shuttle, now only a few feet away. The giant centipede-like insect hovered above the group, its emerald body arched upright, long spindly legs wiggling as the wind and deafening hum of its beating wings filled the air. The thing whipped its serpentine, segmented neck downward, sharp talon-like mouthpieces snapping and hissing at the crouched group, its legs clawing at the smooth concrete around them.  
  
Kalim suddenly noticed Tessik still standing upright behind the creature, aiming a large coal-black gun, with a thick box-like barrel lined with deep grooves, at the insect's body. The security chief silently pulled the trigger and, for an instant, a wave of icy darkness seemed to sweep outward through the air. The wingapede suddenly gave a screeching, high-pitched cry and its snaking body suddenly twisted in on itself, folding and collapsing into a tangled knot until the giant insect finally crushed itself within its own weight. The fluttering pearl-hued wings slowly stopped beating and the monstrous bug slammed onto the concrete, wriggling legs falling limp after a moment of frantic twitching.  
  
"What did you do," Kalim asked, his ears still ringing from the sound of its wings.  
  
"A controlled graviton-pulse directed at the creature's center of mass," Tessik answered as he slipped the weapon back into his coat, "causing it to be crushed by its own amplified gravity. The weapon's based on Belthasar's theory of elemental energy...more specifically, black-elemental effects."  
  
"Belthasar's theory of what," Kalim asked himself in wearying confusion.  
  
"Well then, Kalim," Alissa smiled, seeming almost amused by Kalim's bewilderment as she turned to lead the group back to the city, "welcome to Chronopolis." 


	4. Chapter 2: Heart of the Fire

Chrono Cross: Through Heaven and Hell  
An original fan-fiction by Demon-Fighter Ash  
based on the Square game "Chrono Cross"  
  
Part 1: Future's End  
  
Chapter 2: Heart of the Fire  
March, 2398 AD  
  
The solid metal doors whined shut behind Kalim as he stepped into the sparse bedroom and he glanced silently down at the gleaming reflective plates that covered the floor, peering into the shifting mirror-image of the chamber below his feet, watching as it seemed to drop endlessly away below the floor. He looked back up to study the steel-blue, pipe-covered bedroom walls and the flashing golden-yellow control panel beside the sliding motorized door, and then over to a simple bed covered in white bedsheets, filling one corner of the room, and a metal desk and swivel-chair in the opposite corner.  
  
"This was Belthasar's room," he asked with a glance over his shoulder.  
  
"Indeed," the light chirping voice-synthesizer of the golden automaton answered as it walked into the middle of the room beside him, its weight and metal soles clanging against the floor, "this is the room of the project director. Since you hold that title, it's also your room now."  
  
"Right," Kalim slowly said to himself as he looked around. A few hours ago he'd accepted a military post so mysterious that the general had refused to even tell him what the job involved. Now he stood in a vast, mysterious island-city that, by all indications, he'd been hired to manage.  
  
He closed his eyes and remembered his journey through the entrance hall of Chronopolis; the raised arms of the goddess whose marble image stood watch over the front gates, the blinding light of the bright tropical sun pouring through the transparent force-field windows that filled the right wall and overlooked the shuttle hangar, the checkered white and black squares of the floor, the beige cushioned benches and lush ornamental plants.  
  
The outer hall had seemed almost classical in design, with only a few black digital displays with red scrolling text along the walls to give away the advanced technology of the island; at least, until he'd stepped through the inner doors and past the massive electronically-sealed denadorite gates of the security checkpoint to find a huge inner chamber filled with gliding security robots, the air filled with scrolling holographic images and every wall covered with racing streams of arcane numbers and code.  
  
Even this, he'd quickly noticed, was simply the main hall of the complex, with a glass elevator in the center that led up into the labs and working quarters of the island-city. Workers and white-coated scientists constantly streamed through the complex, barely noticing him in their quick striding pace through the electronic doors and up and down the elevator.  
  
What little conversation he could make out had all been clipped and fast, snippets of baffling discussions about anti-entropy, flame-locks and element-fields. Through the deluge of information and bustling life, he'd recieved one clear impression: whatever went on in Chronopolis, it involved astronomical amounts of information and a constant, almost-frantic pace.  
  
"You're an RY-series robot," Kalim said quickly as he shook his head, trying to distract himself from the shock of the day's events, "have the factories started production on that model again?"  
  
"No," Robo beeped amiably, "I'm one of the first-generation RY-robots."  
  
"First generation," Kalim remarked in surprise, "but you would have to be almost...I mean, sorry, that's a personal..."  
  
"That's alright," the robot interrupted with a soft digitized chuckle, "my thought processors are incapable of vanity. I am, as you guessed, very old. Factory records show that I was assembled in late 1998."  
  
"Less than a year before the Day of Lavos," Kalim said in muted awe, even as he glanced around at the bedroom, surveying the folders scattered about the desk and the bookshelf built into the right-hand wall of the bedroom, "do you remember anything about it?"  
  
"Very little," Robo replied after what Kalim almost imagined to be an awkward pause, "my memory circuits from that era have degraded. Most of my memory-files were recorded during this past century."  
  
"That makes sense," Kalim nodded, his bright blue eyes clouded in sudden thought as he walked to the desk, rolling the chair aside and flipping through the loose folders and pages, "the electro-magnetic pulse from Lavos fried a lot of machinery. Still, that you're around after all this time...are there any other RY-series robots in the military?"  
  
"No," Robo whistled in reply, "but I do have an RY-counterpart working on the central continent named Atropos, who's assisting one the civilian archeological digs. Are you familiar with the reptite ruins?"  
  
"I've read about them," Kalim answered as he continued shuffling through the print-outs and diagrams, "they date from more than 65 million years ago, and a lot of anthropologists think they were created by an advanced race older than humans, maybe descended from reptiles."  
  
"Until the ice age ended their civilization," Robo chirped, "and gave humans a chance to build our civilization instead. Still, I can't help but wonder if there was some way for both our worlds to have survived..."  
  
"I guess we'll never know," Kalim muttered as he set the pages down and then suddenly looked up from the desk, "where are Belthasar's books?"  
  
"Books," Robo beeped curiously.  
  
"Belthasar always writes down his notes in paper books, with quills that he made himself. He was famous at the institute for it, he kept volumes of books with all his thoughts and notes written down in them. But they're not here, these are all just technical reports."  
  
"Perhaps," Robo replied, "Belthasar took those books with him?"  
  
"I don't think so," Kalim answered, thoughtfully tapping the corner of one beige folder against the surface of the metal desk, "the files he left behind all contain theories and experimental results. If he was going to take his research with him, why leave these papers behind?"  
  
"It is also possible," the plump golden robot chirped quietly, "that someone else may have taken both Belthasar and his writings."  
  
"Maybe," Kalim replied, his voice still lowered in thought, "but then there's the same question," he glanced up from the desk to the smooth metal ceiling, and the almost-microscopic speakers and microphones scattered over the ceiling like a rash of tiny black dots.  
  
"FATE," he called out into the air in a loud clear voice, and he heard the small beeps and whirs of the Chronopolis computer directing part of its attention to his room, "when was the first time, after the disappearance of Belthasar, that his online research files were accessed?"  
  
"Belthasar's online files," FATE's melodic feminine voice replied calmly through the speaker-embedded ceiling, "were last accessed on February 19th, 2398, at 1247 hours."  
  
"Which is several hours after he failed to show up for his shift," Kalim nodded to Robo, then raised his voice, "who accessed them?"  
  
"General Sharl, General Taryn, Special Investigator Jereth..."  
  
"That's enough," Kalim interrupted the computer, "were any of the files accessed between the approximate time of Belthasar's disappearance, and the beginning of the investigation on his disappearance?"  
  
"Negative," FATE answered.  
  
"I think," Kalim said as he strained his mind, rubbing the back of his neck as he glanced about the room, "that whatever led to his disappearance, it didn't relate to his research at all. The books he kept might have been taken because they contained clues about what happened, not because of their scientific value. That's why the research files were left untouched."  
  
"Then finding those books," Robo answered with a nod, the tiny electric motors within his neck giving a small hum at the sudden motion, "would be a big help in finding out what happened to Belthasar."  
  
"Exactly," Kalim nodded back, and then spoke up, "FATE, transfer all of Belthasar's online research files to my own inbox," he paused and closed his eyes for a moment, trying to recall the baffling string of codes Tessik had given him an hour before, "authorization code alpha-36, delta-3b."  
  
"Authorization confirmed," FATE's voice replied, "all of the previous curator's online research have been transferred to Colonel Skuld's inbox."  
  
"FATE," Kalim called out with slight, amiable exasperation, "Kalim is fine."  
  
"Acknowledged," the computer answered, "Colonel Kalim Skuld has been reidentified as Kalim."  
  
"It is almost time," Robo said, and Kalim turned back around, "for the orientation meeting."  
  
"Right," Kalim nodded, then tilted his head curiously as both he and the brass-plated robot turned to leave the empty bedroom, "why does FATE keep calling me Colonel anyway? I'm not enlisted and I've never even been in the military before..."  
  
"Colonel," Robo answered cheerfully, "is an honorary rank you hold as the curator and project-director of Chronopolis. It's necessary since the project is under military jurisdiction, but do not worry," the robot gave a soft digitized chuckle, "nobody will expect you to lead any wars."  
  
* * *  
  
A group of people sat in either side of a large viewing screen built into the floor of the conference room, the surface of the screen a few inches below the rest of the metallic floor and the viewscreen itself almost fifteen feet across, dominating the whole room. A thin pink bar of flourescent light illuminated each side of the black transparent screen, and Kalim glanced up from the flat screen to the twin rows of small cobalt-blue desks lining the left and right sides of the display, each chair covered in black leather cushions and facing the large screen on the floor.  
  
He looked sheepishly about the desks and finally noticed an empty spot on the end of the right-hand row of seats, stepping gingerly around the back of the desks as he made his way to the empty chair. He looked around at the staff members that had taken their seats, but he only recognized Alissa, now dressed in a white lab-coat but still wearing her ponytail, and still dressed in the slacks and shirt that worn on the landing platform earlier, sitting in the desk opposite his own; Robo stood by the wall of flashing control panels on the far side of the room, and all the others, a mixture of humans and animal-like mystics, were completely new to him.  
  
"Everybody's here," Robo chirped and Alissa stood silently up from her desk, striding across the room to the line of keyboards and switches, giving a quick glance to Kalim as she stood at the front of the room.  
  
"Kalim Skuld," she nodded her head once to him, then looked back at the group, "this is the senior staff of the El Nido Project, the lead scientists of our physics, genetics, exobiology, and engineering divisions, and I'm the head of the medical and biology staff. Since I'm sure you've read the briefs on all the staff," Kalim tried to give a polite smile to the group, totally oblivious to even their names, "we'll get started on the orientation.  
  
"This is the Sea of El Nido," she reached her left hand behind her and, without looking back, she tapped a few buttons. The darkened monitor on the floor suddenly lit up, casting a soft sky-blue glow across the room. Kalim peered over his desk to see a huge map of the El Nido Sea covering the floor, the image divided into sections by a grid of thin green lines; except for a few rocks and coral outcroppings, the sea was completely empty.  
  
"As it looked prior to the project's formation," Alissa continued, "four years ago. Since then, we've terraformed several islands within the El Nido sea, including the island of Chronopolis itself. There are four other islands in the El Nido project.  
  
"The fire-elemental island," she said as she tapped another, and the small red island in the center of the map began blinking. Kalim studied the image more closely; the steep crimson walls of a volcano rose almost straight up from the shore, so that, except for a few patches of forest around the base of the cliffs, the volcano itself formed most of the island.  
  
"The yellow-elemental island," she said as another island north of the red island began to blink. Even at the aerial scale of the map, he could make out a thin ring of rugged mountains surrounding a small pit of sand. Beyond that, the island looked completely lifeless, a desert.  
  
"The water-elemental island," and a third island, as far south below the central fire-island as the desert island was north, began to blink; this one looked by far the most pleasant of the three, with a crystal pool of water in the middle, surrounded by lush tropical forests on a staggered ring of hills rising toward a central peak overlooking the northern shore.  
  
"The black-elemental island," and with another tap of the button, a fourth island, in the far southeastern corner, began to blink. This island seemed to be carved out of pink glassy coral that rose from the smooth stone ground into rounded hills and rocky plateaus pitted with shadowy mouth-like caves. It seemed forbidding, mystical...almost haunted...  
  
"Each of these islands," Alissa finished, stepping away from the control panel to stand at the edge of the map, "was terraformed over specific geological points according to Belthasar's elemental theory."  
  
"Tessik mentioned that theory too," Kalim asked curiously, looking at the map and then back up at the young woman, who seemed far more comfortable now at the head of the room than she had outside, "what is it?"  
  
"Are you familiar," she asked him, "with the Gaea theory?"  
  
"The theory that the planet itself is a living entity," he nodded, "and that all living things are a part of its own life-cycle."  
  
"It's not a theory anymore," Alessa replied and she stepped back to the panel to tap another button, "Belthasar proved that Gaea is real."  
  
A new image flashed across the screen and Kalim looked down at the floor at a diagram of the planet itself, divided into cross-sections to show the thin outer crust, the thick dark mantle and the fiery inner core of the planet. Four winding ribbons of colorful energy looped and twisted in and out of the planet's surface, countless loops dipping down into the center of the planet and then rising back out through the crust.  
  
"Each of these four lines represents a stream of elemental energy that weaves in and out of the planet like a river," she swept her hand avove the screen, "red is fire, blue's water, yellow's electricity and black's gravity. These energy streams flow throughout the planet, like the biological cycles of a living being. Just as the human body has circulatory and respiratory systems to carry nutrients and oxygen to every cell, the planet itself has energy streams that carry the four elemental energies across the world and maintain the balance of the climate."  
  
"So these streams control the climate," Kalim asked thoughtfully, "and keep heat from building up by spreading fire-elemental energy across the whole planet. It also keeps the planet from getting too cold..."  
  
"And they control thunderstorms, earthquakes, even gravity," Alessa finished his thought, "these four elements are literally the lifeblood of the planet itself--without them, life would be impossible on this world."  
  
Kalim watched Alessa as she talked, her hands raised and making quick gestures with each point, keeping pace with the almost breathless speed of her speech. He wondered if she might have been a teacher or professor like him, but quickly decided otherwise; as much as she obviously enjoyed science, she seemed to almost be rushing through the lecture.  
  
He glanced around at the rest of the scientists, whose faces varied between bushy-eyed men and taut-faced women to reptilian serpent-women and large furry beasts; nonetheless, all of them listened to Alessa and glanced down at the glowing diagram with polite interest. Kalim quickly realized, with a sudden flush of silent embarrassment, that all of them already knew all this, that the orientation was for his benefit alone.  
  
"How do the islands you terraformed," he quickly focused back on the diagram, "relate to these energy-streams?"  
  
Alessa took a step back toward the wall and with a single tap on the control panel, the image changed back to the map of the El Nido islands, now with colored dots glowing in the center of the four element islands, a blue dot over the water island, red over the volcano, yellow over the desert island, and black over the dark coral island.  
  
"Each of the islands," she explained, gesturing to each one in turn, "matches a point where an elemental energy-stream pierces the surface of the planet, forming a kind of geyser of elemental energy. Belthasar figured out a method for detecting these hot-spots of energy, and we terraformed the islands over four element-points, to harness and amplify them.  
  
"In a sense, each of the islands is an elemental energy-collector, and FATE constantly regulates each hot-spot and draws power from them; we've even developed technology based on storing and then re-directing elemental energy, such as the black-element graviton weapon you saw earlier."  
  
"So is that," Kalim paused, trying to collect his thoughts. It was a vast amount to take in so quickly--the planet's alive, he reflected back over the briefing, and it has four elemental energies. Belthasar found a way to harness the flow of elemental energy and store it...  
  
"Is that," he repeated himself, "the purpose of the project?"  
  
He could understand why the general had been so worried about secrecy; such a discovery represented unimaginable power. With the right technology, they could redirect the flow of the planet's elemental energy--they could control the weather, trigger earthquakes, volcanoes. He didn't dare think what would happen if the Choras Alliance ever found out about the El Nido project, or learned how to control planetary elements...  
  
"No," Alessa replied with a slightly smug half-smile, and he realized that she knew what he'd been thinking, "actually, the elements aren't the reason we're out here at all, they're just a tool we use."  
  
"Then why," Kalim asked, his voice fading into self-doubt and confusion as he tried to make sense out of it. He had just learned that the El Nido project could tap into the life-force of the planet and control it; what could possibly be more important than that?  
  
"The frozen flame," Alessa replied quietly, seeming to answer both his spoken query and the silent question that he'd asked himself, and he noticed that the sprightly voice she'd used had lowered into a soft hushed tone.  
  
"What's that," he asked, remembering the ominous report on the shuttle.  
  
"It is," she paused, searching for the right words, "the power of Lavos."  
  
Kalim's gut instinctively wrenched inward and he felt his breath catch in his throat at the name. He'd seen the pictures in school, had read about the day that the sky turned black, that a rain of fire poured across the whole world, shattering the city-domes and toppling the skyscrapes.  
  
Like every child who learned about the Day of Lavos in history class, he'd had nightmares of the titanic spiky orb rising out of the depths of the earth, and even the pictures of the creature evoked a primal, inborn fear in humans that reason alone could never fully explain.  
  
It felt, for lack of any better explanation, like staring into the face of God--and realizing that God is a predator, and that there is no place for you in the universe, no reason for your life except to be devoured. Nobody talked about that impression, even after so many centuries, but everyone felt it, and the name of Lavos had long since become almost unspeakable.  
  
"How," he managed to ask after a moment of reeling silence.  
  
"It'll be easier to show you," Alissa nodded to Robo and the automaton, who had previously stood silent during the presentation, quickly tapped a few buttons on the back panel, the map-screen growing dark again, the flourescent lights sweeping across the ceiling and blinding Kalim for an instant.  
  
"Send a message to the monitoring team," he heard her say to Robo, "we're going to the core chamber."  
  
* * *  
  
"So there are four elements," Kalim asked aloud as the group walked through the cobalt-blue metal hallway, past the sealed electronic laboratory doors, and crowded into the large glass elevator that tunneled up and down through the core of the Chronopolis research center, the huge oddly-shaped tower he'd seen outside when the shuttle landed.  
  
"Belthasar believes so," Alissa replied quickly as she led the way.  
  
"But he was open to the possibility of other elements," another voice, a thin raspy voice that sounded as though it were speaking through a mouthful of gravel, interrupted, and Kalim turned his head sideways to find one of the scientists striding alongside him, a short, stone-gray, gargoyle-like beast whose gleaming fangs, short flurttering leathery wings and sharp claws belied the look of calm intelligence in its small black eyes.  
  
"Grimlak," the creature nodded with an imp-like smile to Kalim, "head of the genetics department. As I was saying," even as he spoke, everyone had pushed their way into the elevator and Kalim felt his stomach jerk a little as the elevator began its descent into the depths of the facility, "Alissa is a wonderful biologist, but her comparisions of the planet's elemental energy to vital systems like blood and oxygen is a little misleading."  
  
"How so," Kalim tilted his head slightly, aware of the barely-audible, but clearly exasperated, sigh from Alissa over his shoulder.  
  
"There is a harmony, a musical quality to the elements that such vital systems lack. They compliment each other like musical notes. It's a little bit like DNA itself, with adenine and thynine binding together into harmony with guanine and cytosine to form the helix..."  
  
Kalim suddenly understood Alissa's exasperation; Grimlak seemed to be a poet, a dreamer and artist who'd become a scientist to explore the beauty of the world. Kalim had never understood that philosophy; the universe simply was what it was, and he thought it seemed unprofessional to try to impose values like beauty and harmony onto science. Still, the mystics had their own way of thinking, and they could be as ingenuous as any human.  
  
"So the elements," he asked, "are like music?"  
  
"Right," the gargoyle nodded, "but they're incomplete. The fire and water elemental forces, for example, merge completely with one another to produce a third force, like notes blending into a chord. But the yellow and black elements don't blend with each other at all."  
  
"So there might be two more elements that they WOULD blend with?"  
  
"At least, and all the complete elements could merge together into a single harmony. The four elements we know about don't do that at all, so there must be more elements that we don't know about."  
  
"We're here," Robo's digitized voice chirped as the elevator slowed beneath Kalim's feet. He hadn't thought about it during the conversation, but they had practically raced through the elevator shaft the whole way down; as far as he could guess, this new floor must be deep below sea-level, perhaps just a few feet from the ocean bed.  
  
"We're now at the base of the island," Alissa called out as the group poured out between the opening elevator doors. They stepped out onto a long metal bridge spanning a gleaming concave pit that seemed to stretch forward for miles, as far as he could see. Huge cables stretched out like serpents from the sides of the bowl-shaped floor to connect to the walls of a huge round tower that reached up into the shadowy heights of the circular vault; the bridge led to a small sealed doorway in the middle of the tower.  
  
"That tower," Robo beeped as he stepped beside Kalim, who stood staring at the gleaming spire, "contains the frozen flame. This is actually the same spot that the flame was first found. We built the tower around the flame and pumped out all the seawater so we could set up the lab around it; the city and the other islands were constructed more than a year later."  
  
"Why didn't you simply move the flame," Kalim asked the robot, still trying to figure out what Alissa had meant about the flame being the power of Lavos, and vaguely recalling a report he'd read on his way to El Nido, about a mining team trying to move the flame when it was discovered.  
  
"Do you remember the island in the southwest corner of the map," Robo asked as they walked down the bridge toward the tower, Alissa gliding a few steps ahead of the group as she talked quickly and forcefully with the inner tower's staff through a small handheld communicator.  
  
Now that Kalim thought about it, he did remember a fifth island in the far southwest corner, a round patch of misty forest rising along steep rocky walls out of the ocean. He even remembered seeing it from the shuttle, and he simply nodded to the golden-shelled robot, wondering why nobody had mentioned that island during the briefing on El Nido.  
  
"An undersea mining team found the flame hovering above the ocean floor six years ago and tried to hoist it to the surface. Their disturbance caused a temporal shock-wave that obliterated the mining rig and killed most of its crew in seconds. Once the flame had become dormant again, an entirely new island had appeared in the southwest corner."  
  
"Where did it come from?"  
  
"We believe that it's a patch of land torn out of its original era by the temporal disturbance," Robo answered, "that island has become known as Wingapede Isle, since it's the source of the wingapedes--and the most recent fossils of wingapedes date more than 65 million years ago."  
  
"A prehistoric jungle," Kalim whispered to himself. The creature he'd seen outside was a relic from the dawn of time, dragged into the present by the power of the "frozen flame," whatever that meant. No wonder they'd built the lab around the flame, he thought, if simply trying to lift it out of the ocean had pulled a prehistoric forest out of the past...  
  
Two hulking black robots stood on either side of the closed silver door and Alissa stepped into a blue glowing circle on the floor to the left of the door, pressing her left palm against a square glass plate built into the wall beside the door. A wide triangular sheet of faint laser-light swept out from the wall-mounted security scanner, down from her forehead to her ankles, then back up to her turquoise eyes, as everyone else waited.  
  
"Analyzing," a synthetic female voice said over the seemingly-invisible intercome system, this one sounding just slightly more distorted, deeper than the voice he'd heard in Belthasar's room, "please stand by."  
  
They stood now at the end of the walkway, beneath the base of the round pillar that formed the flame's inner chamber, the gleaming steel walls of the arena-like chamber lit by a faint pulsing blue glow.  
  
"Was it just me," he asked the RY-robot, "or did that voice sound a little different from FATE's usual voice?"  
  
"The frozen flame," Robo chirped, "seems to have an interesting effect on the technology this close to its core. After the lab was completed, the tower's security system would only grant access to Belthasar, who it called the Arbiter. Once he disappeared, though, it restored access to the senior staff of Chronopolis. We still haven't figured out why that happened."  
  
"You're saying the flame," Kalim asked, his sapphire-blue eyes wide in surprise, "can somehow manipulate the hardware surrounding it?"  
  
"Only the security system within the containment tower, and it seems to have gone dormant. The rest of the center is unaffected."  
  
Who in their right mind, Kalim found himself wondering, would want to study something that could hack into computers, rip islands out of the past, destroy ships in seconds...something that held the power of Lavos...  
  
"Analysis complete," the computerized voice suddenly called out over the speakers, and he looked back up, instantly forgetting his momentary doubt as the door suddenly slid open to reveal a soft golden glow within the tower, "security level confirmed, access granted."  
  
The group stepped through the door, one after another, and Kalim gasped at the sight of the inner chamber. The slate-gray walls of the chamber rose up from the floor like a vast wide bowl and then straightened into the inner walls of the round tower, shooting miles above them toward the surface of the artificial island. A wide ring of metal catwalks stretched around the tower over their heads, ladders scattered around the edge of the laboratory leading up from the ground level of the room up onto the hanging catwalk.  
  
The same gigantic cables that Kalim had seen plugged into the tower's outer walls stretched through the heights of the vault, connecting to huge needle-like laser projectors that hung from the inner walls on every side of the tower. Dozens of the thick spiky machines all pointed inward from every angle, pointing toward the center of the tower, almost a hundred feet over Kalim's head, and the hundreds of questions and mysteries that had been buzzing through his mind faded into awed silence as he looked up...  
  
Countless beams of yellow light poured into a huge transparent golden orb hovering high above the laboratory, almost filling the tower; whether the flickering globe was made of glass, or if it was an energy bubble, he had no way of telling. The long silver needles of the laser-projectors pierced the shell of the bubble, firing the beams into a smaller globe of crimson light floating in the center of the large globe.  
  
A huge pedastal rose up from the floor within the bottom of the larger yellow globe, and a gigantic robotic arm, nearly fifty feet tall, stretched up through both the golden shell and the smaller crimson orb, three claw-like prongs surrounding the object in the center of the inner sphere, the target of all the steady laser beams fired into the center of the two orbs. Kalim stared up at it, a brilliant yellow shape that looked, more than anything else, like a miniature star, casting the lab in a deep golden glow.  
  
His first impulse was to twist away from the light, to keep the blinding glow from burning his eyes--but he gradually noticed that the light didn't hurt him. He instead found himself staring deeper into the steady amber glow. It seemed ancient, beautiful beyond any words, like the light of creation itself. He heard himself speaking, his words sounding dazed...  
  
"What," he asked the whole room, nobody in particular, "is it?"  
  
"The outer shell," he heard Tessik's voice answer, "is the elemental energy field that FATE uses to counter the flame's energy. The inner shell is the focused energy of the flame itself, which is contained by the laser beams. The glowing object in the center is the frozen flame."  
  
"No," Kalim glanced around to find Tessik monitoring the controls on the pedastal that formed the base of the vast outer shell, "I mean," and he paused, his mind flooded by the light, "what IS it?"  
  
"It's the power of Lavos," Alissa replied as she turned back from a group of technicians along one of the workstations lining the outer walls, beneath the catwalk, "more than three hundred years ago the creature we call Lavos emerged from the core of our world, destroying many of our cities and threatening to annihilate our whole planet. To this day, we still don't know exactly who or what the 'gate-travellers' that defeated it were, where they came from, or what their motives were."  
  
"This," she said after a moment's pause, "is the essence of what emerged from the world's core almost four centuries ago."  
  
Kalim found his gaze drawn from her face back to the warm glow within the energy-shells; he knew the horror that Lavos's form awakened in people, everyone did, and yet the golden light seemed gentle, soothing. He shook his head and made himself look back down at the scientists.  
  
"How is that possible?"  
  
"After the destruction of Lavos," he heard Alissa's voice answering, "scientists searched its shell, only to find it mostly empty--whatever organs the creature might have had, they must have been vaporized during its death throes. But they measured a trace of energy within the shell unlike anything they'd ever known--a form of energy that warps the fabric of time around it. We've come to call it 'anti-entropic energy' since then.  
  
"The frozen flame," she continued, "is pure anti-entropic energy, the same energy that Lavos emitted. And it seems to be infinite."  
  
"Even Lavos," Kalim muttered as he stared into the light, "wasn't infinitely powerful..."  
  
"No," a slight male voice answered, one he hadn't heard before, and Kalim noticed one of the head scientists from the meeting stepping forward from the group, a short man with thin brown hair and glasses.  
  
"I'm the head of the physics department," he introduced himself awkwardly before continuing "the frozen flame is a seemingly infinite source of energy, enough to have condensed into a physical shape.  
  
"Although Lavos was killed in this reality," he continued, "there are an infinite number of parallel timelines where it is still alive. The energy fields of all those alternate-world Lavos have bled through the dimensions and mixed with each other to create a single energy-field.  
  
"Just as you can see the sun even through a thin curtain, so the energy of Lavos can warp spacetime and bleed into the worlds where Lavos itself doesn't exist. The frozen flame is that energy."  
  
"So it's an echo of Lavos," Kalim repeated softly.  
  
"An echo of every Lavos," the physicist replied, "that exists on every alternate version of our world. It's their combined life-forces, mixed like different colors of paint into one spot, here in the Sea of El Nido."  
  
"Why here?"  
  
"Because in all the parallel versions of our world, this is where Lavos resides. The frozen flame is the sum of all the energy they emit, piercing the barrier between timelines and creating a nexus of energy."  
  
Kalim looked back up, tilting his head back over his shoulders, to gaze into the heart of the flame; the pulsing glow filled his eyes, casting a dim yellow glow across his pupils as he found his gaze drawn deeper by the gentle warmth of the golden light. He felt the light of a thousand worlds pouring into his blue eyes, his mind filled with the faint humming song of countless Lavos stretched through infinite timelines, all of it pouring silently through the dimensional window of the frozen flame.  
  
He tried to imagine the energy of all the different worlds converging within the light of the flame, tried to calculate the sum totals of all those wave-functions, but his thoughts died away into a wordless throbbing warmth, flooded by the hypnotic flicker of the amber glow filling the center of the elemental containment field. All of it seemed insignificant: the elements, the project, the explanations, none of it mattered compared to the light of the flame, to the voice calling him deeper into the light...  
  
Kalim suddenly found himself alone in the middle of a blizzard; icy winds swept around him and he turned left and right, looking through the blue void and quickly finding the frozen flame floating before him. It hovered a few feet away, a jagged thing of streaked crimson and orange light, wavy arms sprouting from its core, where red eyes stared out at him through the frozen air...  
  
His mind reeled, the world seeming to tilt and swim for a moment--and then he saw computer screens of the core-chamber exploding, the ring-shaped catwalk crashing into the ground, the glowing containment spheres vanishing. The blood-red light of the frozen flame poured into the winding halls of Chronopolis like a river of twilight, people screaming and vanishing, the island itself fading away into an empty howling abyss.  
  
A silent apparition emerged from the darkness like a pale ghost drifting through the night...  
  
She hung frozen alive within a shaft of crystal rock, clad in long robes that had long since faded into plain white fabric, her hair bleached of its color by a near-eternity of darkness. A thin whistling music filled his ears, a hollow melody that sent a shiver down his spine. A long thin crack slowly ran down the pillar, a dark line running down the front of the clear column, down the side of her face. She looked beautiful and young, barely older than a teenager, and yet ancient, her closed eyes etched with ageless wisdom.  
  
The crack widened slightly. She slowly began to open her eyes, a dark beautiful madness within her sockets that seemed to fill his being. He saw the madness in her eyes, the loneliness, her hatred for the world that she'd watched and envied for so many millenia. He also saw her hunger, the aching, gnawing emptiness that a thousand worlds couldn't sate.  
  
She opened her dark eyes and stared at him. The emptiness and madness of her gaze bored into his soul, infecting him, drowning his thoughts--and Kalim suddenly screamed in panic.  
  
"Kalim...Kalim...Kalim!"  
  
He felt something hard and angular slam into his lower back and he looked wildly around, engulfed by darkness. Voices and wailing alarms filled his ears, then subsided into calm murmering tones, as someone said his name over and over again.  
  
Kalim quickly realized that his eyes were closed and he opened them to find himself leaning against one of the control panels on the back wall of the core-chamber. Tessik, Alissa and Robo peered curiously at him, the other leading scientists standing in a ring around him behind the first three, while the remaining technicians continued monitoring the flame from the digital work-stations scattered along the outer walls.  
  
"What," he asked weakly, still blinking against the flickering golden light of the containment spheres as he slowly began to realize that nothing had changed, that the flame was as stable as ever, "what happened?"  
  
"You were looking up at the flame," Alissa answered slowly, "when you seemed to go into a trance for a few seconds. Do you have any medical condition, like epilepsy, that could cause siezures?"  
  
"No," Kalim shook his head, still dazed, "no, I don't..."  
  
"There was an unusually large spike," Tessik said in a calm, almost monotonous voice, "in the flame's energy emissions for approximately half a second, but FATE was able to counter the increase almost immediately."  
  
"I thought the flame was contained," Kalim asked as he began to regain his senses.  
  
"It is," Tessik replied firmly, "but the emissions are so erratic that we have to match them by constantly adjusting the elemental field. FATE predicts and counters the flame's patterns, much like," Tessik paused for just an instant before speaking, "like playing a game of chess."  
  
"I saw something," Kalim said softly, as the rest of the scientists began to relax and resumed their own conversations, "when the flame's energy surged, I guess. It was," he paused, trying to remember the flood of images and feelings and finding that they'd already begun to fade away like half-forgotten dreams, "darkness, the flame...someone was there..."  
  
"Interesting," Robo whistled and chirped in reply as Kalim shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts, "there was only one other person who reacted to the frozen flame's energy with such visions."  
  
"Who?"  
  
"The previous curator," Robo answered with a curious tilt of his head, "Belthasar." 


End file.
